I am not a huge fan of the contact card feature in Outlook 2010 and later. I find the old-fashioned, multi-tabbed dialog box far more functional and easier to read. Perhaps I am just old and resistant to change. Whatever the reason, I recently reached the end of my patience with the feature and decided…

A customer contacted to report a problem with Outlook’s AutoDiscover feature. The customer was a former BPOS customer that was testing some mailboxes deployed onto a new on-premises environment. The testExchangeConnectivity validation tool was reporting consistent results, so it appeared to be client related, but given the general complexity of the environment (domains, networks, VPNs,…

Secure by default is a great response to the security problems that plagued Microsoft nearly a decade ago, but sometimes we, as consumers of a product, confuse the concepts of vulnerability and functionality. The receive connector is an example that I recently revisited, causing me enough confusion with a customer that I felt it might be…

Ran into this event on an Exchange DAG where the customer was reporting that Exchange seemed to be making arbitrary decisions to randomly failover from Node1 to Node2 of the mailbox cluster. Some investigation showed that the 1006 event always corresponded to a 4082 MSExchangeRepl event in the application log and the events seemed to…

It’s always the hardware. If it’s not the firewall, it’s the network. If it’s not the network, it turns out, it might be the CD drive. Strangest situation encountered today. Tyring to install Exchange 2010 SP1 integrated on a new server (virtualized). The CD is linked to the physical CD on the host. When we…

I recently was working with a customer to build a reporting solution for their Exchange 2010 environment. The report was going to be used for billing and compliance administration. Basically, the organization needed to know how many mailboxes per customer, what some key settings on those mailboxes were. We had a couple of challenges. The first was…

In the RBAC world, it should be possible to create a new management role, based on the built-in role “Mail-enable public folders.” The built-in role allows delegates/members to run the enable-mailpublicfolder cmdlet. When you add users to the built-in role, they can execute assigned duties without incident. However, when you create a new management role,…

I’ve been working an interesting challenge this week in attempt to convert email address policies from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010. As part of the conversion process, LDAP queries that define the recipient filter (to which the policy will apply) need to be converted to oPath queries. In most environments, these queries are pretty simple….

UPDATE (3/28/11): I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile, unable to believe that someone else hadn’t already thought of the obvious. Did a little research this morning and realized all my work was in vein (but I am happy about it). Excel does have an =CONVERT(number,from_unit,to_unit) function built in and is much easier than…

I am sure this information exists elsewhere, but it falls into that category of something I do just often enough to forget how to do it. So, if you find yourself needing to see which objects have been recently deleted from a domain, you can follow these steps to do it. Open LDP Select Controls…